


Agency

by ongreenergrasses



Category: Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 11:52:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13213182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ongreenergrasses/pseuds/ongreenergrasses
Summary: Things are not as easy as she had hoped.(The world of men, and adjustments.)...A gift for heaven-if-there-is-one on Tumblr, as part of the 2017 Wondertrev Secret Santa.





	Agency

Things are not as easy as she had hoped they would be. She wanted to think that all things would fall into place once she had him back by her side. Maybe this was a folly, but she has always been a woman of faith. She has always been one to believe that the steps of a journey are not important so much as the destination.

Everything is much more complicated than she anticipated.

“But why can we not live together?” she asks, again. She is a patient woman but she cannot help this feeling, an intense cramping feeling of frustration building up inside of her.

“It’s not right, Diana,” he says, again, and she can hear frustration brimming in his own voice. She hopes that it’s not directed towards her. “That’s not how things work.”

He has guided her through this world, and for that she is grateful, but sometimes she can’t help but be frustrated with him. He tells her how things work, and he tells her which things she can and cannot do in good faith, but for some reason he never explains what things really mean. She does not like that he lives in a different apartment than her, does not like that he can only ever visit her, because for her to be seen coming and going from his place would be improper.

“Can we just get married,” she huffs, nudging him in the leg with her toes. It’s getting late, the pink that streaked the clouds earlier fading to black across the London skyline, and she knows that it is about time that he go back to his own home. She does not want him to leave.  

Steve looks like he might choke.

“I mean, if that’s what you want,” he finally says, swallowing and swallowing, and she nods.

“If it means we will be able to live together,” she says. She sees no drawback to this.

“People will want you to take my last name,” he tells her.

“Do you want me to take your last name?” Diana is not attached to her last name. She knows who she is, and Steve, after all, has given her the last name that she now uses.

“Not really,” he says, and so she shrugs and the next day they go to get a marriage certificate. Nothing seems to change between them besides the fact that they now share a house. She likes this. She likes having bits of Steve everywhere, likes getting to see him in the morning and in the evening. She loves her work that she does with the women, attempting to secure the vote, but it is hard. She still cannot read, and she tries and tries but still the symbols that they call letters do not make any sense to her. She takes things to the printing press offices, and she distributes flyers and makes house calls because she has been told that she has a compelling voice. She does not disagree with this assessment. It is the reason that her mother thought that she would one day become a senator, but Diana has never had a head for politics. She speaks too quickly.

She thinks that things will be easier than this at home. She and Steve are similar, because for them the work always comes first. She leaves before he does in the morning, he gets back after she does at night, they alternate who cooks dinner. She still does not really enjoy using the stove, instead preferring to cook over an open fire, but the first time she attempts this Steve just about loses his mind. She has learned since then that open fires and homes in the world of men do not mix well. She is happy, although she misses her mother and she misses her training. She goes on the roof of their building to train, now. Steve stands guard so that no one will come upon her, because she wears her old clothing from Themyscira and for someone to see her like that would also be improper.

There are so many rules. She does not remember them all, cannot remember them all, and it is too easy to start building a fire on the kitchen table or reach for the Godkiller when she is getting too vexed at work. She only knows relationships from what she has seen on Themyscira, never having lived with a man, never even seen a man before Steve, and she soon realizes that she has underestimated the vast difference that he brings into her life. Men are something else. This is something she knows, after spending time with Chief and Charlie and Sameer and Steve. They are either messy, as Charlie had been, leaving a trail of belongings behind him wherever he went, or they are like Steve. Steve is incredibly neat. He is so neat that it sets her teeth on edge, because she has long since learned the importance of keeping her quarters neat but she also does not waste time or space. She leaves small things out on the table, lets her shoes fall where they may, has never dusted in her life. Steve is her opposite. He washes his clothes more than anyone she has ever met, folds things into sharp squares, lines his clothes neatly up against the edge of the dresser drawers. He cleans every weekend, is meticulous about where everything goes, and his insistence on neatness starts to irritate her after about two weeks. She is not diplomatic enough to tell him this kindly.

“But why do you do that,” she complains, “why do you have to line up everything, it will not hurt you if that shirt is not perfect,” and that is their first fight.

(She still does not understand. She hates that he slams the door behind him, because it makes her feel as if she has done something wrong, and she just wants him to tell her why he does things the way he does.)

He confuses her and even when he answers questions he does not answer them enough, he does not tell her exactly why he does things. There are some things he will not talk about at all and she would not mind this, because there are also things she does not talk about with him. She does not expect him to share everything with her. It bothers her because she cannot understand, and she cannot read his mind. She has questions that he cannot answer, that he does not know the answer to, and Diana begins to miss her sisters and her mother so fiercely that it aches.

She turns to Etta instead. She begins to compile a list but she still cannot write, so she just scribbles some vague drawings as a sort of reminder. She wants to learn how to stop her stockings from getting holes in them. It drives her insane, because no matter how careful she is they will catch on her nails or catch on her garters and rip, and Steve is no help. (He understands garters, not fingernails.) She also wants to learn how to bake bread, because she is painfully aware that she is not like most women in the world of man; she does not clean, she does not care for the house, and she has worked every day since she arrived. She does not see this as a bad thing, but she also does not want to annoy Steve, because she thinks that he may have expected to someday end up with a woman who does things like care for the house. She wants to understand more about sex, because Clio was not very comprehensive on the area of men, and although Diana thinks she has become rather well versed, she still has questions. She does not understand why Steve always wants to have sex in the morning – it is a waste of the energy that the body regains overnight. She does not know if Etta will answer her questions, she muses, because some of them are invasive, and then Steve looks over at her and asks why she is using a pen to draw instead of a pencil, and that day she learns that there are many different things that can be used to write and draw.

“Teach me to write, Steve,” she says the next day, and he raises an eyebrow but also jerks his chin towards the spot next to him on the couch, reaching to grab a piece of paper and a pen off of the end table. She bounces over and tucks herself neatly into his side.

“Let’s do your name first,” he says, and he quickly prints out her name into two different sets of letters.

“There are two?” she shrieks, and Steve nearly drops the pen.

“This is called cursive,” he says, tapping the one that looks like art, with swirls and spirals and circles. “You learn it after you can do the other one.”

“I cannot even read, Steve,” she says morosely, and he starts laughing.

“Let’s just start with your name,” he repeats, “and then we can work on reading.”

She copies her name every moment she gets the chance. She fills the paper he has given her, moves to a napkin the next morning while Steve flicks through the newspaper. (Newspaper, another concept that she does not understand. The idea that anything eventful, anything of relevance, can be compressed down into small markings and shipped out en masse, completely devoid of all emotion, is not something that she really likes to think about.) Her letters do not look exactly like Steve’s, will not look exactly like Steve’s, and she eventually gets so frustrated that she throws her pen across the room.

“My letters do not look like yours,” she says.

“They won’t.” She raises an eyebrow. “Everyone has their own handwriting, it’s unique from person to person.”

“Why did you not tell me this earlier?”

It is their second fight.

She adds another question to the list, after that. She does not understand why she fights with Steve, does not understand why he sometimes sets her teeth on edge. She loves him, she has known this for a long time, his absence was one of the most painful things she has ever felt, and yet sometimes she cannot help but argue with him because he does not understand or he does not try or he does not do things the way she does.

“Why do I fight him?” she asks Etta despairingly. They are both going to Etta’s for dinner, but since her job finishes earlier in the day, she has arrived far before Steve will.

“Oh?”

“He irritates me so much,” she moans, trying hard not to drop her head down on the kitchen table in exasperation. “He forgets to tell me important things and he just…he always folds things, Etta!”

“Most women would be happy to have a man that folds things,” Etta mutters. Diana glares at her. “He’s in your space, love. You won’t coexist with him perfectly, you won’t, not with anyone. The important thing is that the things that bother you are small ones.” Diana thinks on this.

“They are so exasperating,” she mutters.

“But has he slept with another woman?”

“What? Etta! Steve would never – he is only ever the most honest, the most faithful, he would never - ”

“Does he work too late? Does he lie to you?”

“He does what he says he will,” Diana insists. “He is a man of his word.”

“There you have it,” Etta says, and she looks altogether too pleased with herself. “You make each other happy, Diana. Sometimes he’ll annoy the pants off you, but the things that annoy you are small ones.”

“He is teaching me to read,” she says proudly. She has almost mastered the letters that make up the alphabet. They are the basic version, not the cursive ones, but she can tell that he is proud of her just the same.

“Really?” Etta says, intrigued, and that is the exact moment when Steve comes in the door. He is always loud when he comes in, stamping the snow off his boots and knocking over three things as he tries to hang up his hat, and Diana launches herself at him.

“Whoa, hi,” he says, clearly bemused at her exuberance.

“I love you,” she says, because Steve makes her want to say things like that, and then, “I am glad we only fight about little things.”

He laughs. “Me too,” he says, and kisses her.

She asks Etta about the contents of her list later that night. Etta has answers for almost everything, and she tells Diana to come to her house the next day and she expects that Diana will enjoy kneading the bread dough. (Diana does not know what this means, but she trusts Etta’s judgment.)

Etta is right. Diana very much enjoys kneading the dough. It seems to lessen the itchy feeling of frustration that has plagued her ever since she came to the world of men.

“Very nice,” Etta says. “I’ll show you how to make pastries next.”

“There’s more?”

“Oh yes,” Etta says, “oh yes, we’ll make a baker out of you yet.”

Etta teaches her to make pies and pastries and tarts and cakes and rolls and everything that she knows how to do that involves dough. Diana has always had a good memory, and she remembers the recipes quickly enough that soon she is able to start making them at home. She makes savory pies when it is her turn to cook dinner. She enjoys dealing with the pastry, enjoys chopping things up and picking out what flavors go well together. One time her pie is too dry and she pours in wine on top of it. She likes the result so well that she does it again, and again, and every time she makes a pie.

“Do you like doing that?” Steve asks her over dinner. She chews slowly. She is trying to determine whether or not red wine was a mistake in this particular creation.

“Hmmmm?”

“Cooking.” He looks slightly uncomfortable, and she thinks hard about what she possibly could have done to make him feel this way. “I don’t want you to feel like – Diana, I don’t want you to feel like you have to learn to cook on my account.”

“Steve,” she says, drawing his name out into something longer than its usual syllable, “have you ever made bread?”

“No,” he says.

“If you made bread,” she continues, “you would see why I enjoy it. I am doing these things because I enjoy them, and I enjoy making you happy, so if this does not make you happy then you do not have to eat it.” She thinks that this is a polite way of expressing her sentiment, but he also looks slightly as if he has been slapped. She still has much to learn.

“Show me how to make bread,” he says instead, and she immediately acquiesces.

Steve enjoys it. Steve enjoys making bread at least as much as she does, and therein lies a larger problem.

“Steve!” she calls one day. She had needed to go into work to finish planning for a protest, but he has his day off. There are two loaves of bread cooling on the counter. He pops his head around the corner. “We have to stop making bread.”

“Why?”

Diana goes to the breadbox and takes out the three loaves she had made the previous night. “Unless you are planning on eating all three of these,” she says, “there is no way we can possibly dispose of all of it.”

“I’ll take it to Etta,” he says, nonplussed. “She hates baking.”

And yet she had taught Diana to make bread, to bake everything she knows. Humans will never cease to surprise her, she thinks.

“Come on,” he says. “Come read this to me, I’m tired.”

She is improving at reading. She still does not know every word she happens across, and Steve assures her that this is a problem she will run into for as long as she reads. There are too many words for her to know them all. She sounds words out and sometimes she struggles with that. Much as many things are in the world of men, many words are not written as they sound, not presented for what they truly mean. She has come to see the value of a newspaper; it amazes her that she can know what is happening in different places all around the world, without having to do anything other than fetch a collection of words off of her doorstep. She still is not convinced of the concept behind it.

Steve goes to bed early, and she takes the newspaper out into the kitchen. She copies the words down, one by one, as carefully as she can to make sure that they match the typeface. (Steve keeps telling her that her handwriting will never match exactly. She is hoping to prove him wrong.)

She seeks out the words she wants to copy down, because she still feels like she comes up short in comparison to other women in this world.

_ I love you _ , she prints carefully on a scrap of paper.  _ Have a good day. _

She tucks this into Steve’s jacket pocket, and then she goes to bed.

Things are not easy. They are getting better. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Wondertrevnet, for organizing this secret santa; thanks to the sun in Tasmania; and thanks to you, for reading.


End file.
